Recent trends indicate a considerable increase in the amount of content being shared over the Internet. One popular approach for sharing content involves creating a new email, copying and pasting into the email a uniform resource locator (URL) link directed to a web page that includes the content, and then sending the email to one or more individuals. Though this approach is efficient in many aspects, there are also many drawbacks, which include, for example, incomprehensive or out-of-date email address books that limit deliverability of the shared content to intended recipients, spam filters erroneously flagging the email as spam, and the like. As a result, alternative approaches for sharing content have been developed.
One alternative approach involves sharing content via social network “posts.” To post content within a social network, an individual accesses an interface through which he or she is able to create a new post that includes, for example, photos and videos (uploaded through the interface), or a link to a particular web page (by specifying a URL via the interface). In some cases, when the new post is directed to a web page, the provider of the social network visits the web page and extracts information from the web page for display within the post, e.g., an excerpt of text from the web page. This beneficially indicates to viewers of the post the safety and nature of the web page to which the URL is directed, which is a feature that is absent from the email-based approach described above.
One of the issues with the foregoing content sharing approaches is that they indirectly lead users to attempt sharing private URLs that may or may not be accessible by others. Consider, for example, a user who is logged into a photo storage web site and who attempts to share the URL “https://www.photo-website.com/user_123/photos”, which is directed to a secure web page that displays a private gallery of the user's digital photographs. In this example, the photo storage web site, when receiving a request to access the web page to which the URL is directed, delivers the web page to the requestor only if the requestor has provided valid login information; otherwise, the photo storage web site returns an invalid web page notification to the requestor. As a result, most—if not all—of the recipients of the shared URL are unable to access the web page to which the URL is directed, since they likely do not (and should not) possess the user's credentials.